Chapter 3: Thirty-Four Tuesdays
She did not say anything about the letter that night, or the next, or for the ten nights after that. She told herself it was strategy.
It was not strategy. It was that he came home with lemons and chives and a bag of the good tea, and stood in the kitchen doorway with the shopping in one arm and Crookshanks winding round his ankles, and said, "The radiator. I think there's a Doxy nest behind the skirting. Don't let me forget," and she found she could not open her mouth without something unplanned coming out of it.
So she said, "Thank you for the tea," and went to bed at nine like a coward, and lay awake until one listening to him talk to her cat in French through the wall.
Wellbelove came on a Saturday, at seven in the morning, and he knocked like a man who had been looking forward to it.
Hermione was awake. She had been awake since five, sitting at the kitchen table with the Fund's Register of Interested Purchasers, which she had requested from Archives on the day of the reading and which had arrived the previous afternoon, Archives being Archives, in a box tied with red tape. She was on page two hundred and nine. She had found what she was looking for on page one hundred and forty, and had kept reading anyway, because she had needed to be sure.
The knock came again.
Draco's door opened. He stood in the hallway in a grey T-shirt and pyjama trousers, his hair flattened on one side, looking more awake than anyone had a right to look at seven in the morning.
"That," he said, "is either the Doxies or Wellbelove."
"Doxies don't knock."
"The way this flat's going, I wouldn't rule it out." He looked past her, at the spare room behind him: his trunks, the sailing ship, the folded jumpers, the single toothbrush in a glass on the windowsill because he'd never actually used his half of the bathroom shelf. Then at her bedroom, with its one pillow dented and the other untouched. "Granger."
"I know."
"Good faith can't be rehearsed."
"I know." She raised her wand. "Do you trust me?"
He looked at her for one second longer than the situation could afford.
"Yes," he said.
She did it in four movements. His jumpers flew down the hall in a soft grey flock and stacked themselves in her wardrobe. The toothbrush went to the bathroom. The sailing ship lifted off its nail and hung itself above her chest of drawers, slightly crooked, and she left it crooked because nobody really hung pictures straight in their own home. His trunks shrank to the size of matchboxes and slid under her bed. She turned the spare room into a study with a Transfiguration she'd last used for a Ministry exam: desk, lamp, a filing cabinet full of nothing.
Draco watched the whole thing with his arms folded.
"You've thought about this," he said.
"I think about everything."
"Yes," he said, in a very odd voice. "I'm starting to get that."
She opened the door.
"Mr and Mrs Granger-Malfoy," said Corvin Wellbelove warmly, in a camel overcoat, with a clipboard. "I'm so sorry. I do hope I haven't woken you."
He wanted to interview them separately. It was standard, he said. Clause Eight, sub-clause two. She had written that too.
He took Draco first, into the new study, and closed the door. Hermione made tea she didn't drink and stood at the counter, and after the first minute she gave up pretending, crossed the hall in her socks, and stood beside the door where the old warehouse plaster had a crack in it you could hear through, if you knew where to stand.
"How does your wife take her tea, Mr Malfoy?"
"Milk in first. Which is wrong. I've told her it's wrong. She says the Queen's household did it in the war to stop the china cracking, as if that's a defence."
"Her favourite book?"
"She hasn't got one. She's got about forty, depending on what she's angry about. When she's tired she reads Austen and pretends it's research. She reads the last page first. Always. She says she can't concentrate on a story if she doesn't know whether it's going to be worth it."
There was a pause. Hermione stared at the crack in the plaster. She had never told anyone about the last page. Not Harry. Not Ron, in two years. She had certainly never told Draco Malfoy, who had lived in her flat for three weeks and in her general vicinity, she was beginning to realise, for considerably longer.
"And does your wife have any distinguishing marks?" said Wellbelove. "Scars, that sort of thing? For the file."
The pause this time was much longer.
"She wears long sleeves," Draco said. "Even in August."
"And why is that?"
"I know why," said Draco. His voice was perfectly level and perfectly cold, and she had not heard him use that voice since the trials. "It isn't yours to write down."
Hermione went back to the kitchen and stood with both hands flat on the counter until she could breathe properly.
Her own interview was faster. She knew he spoke to Crookshanks in French and swore in it too. She knew he hummed when he worked, always the same four bars of something she suspected was a Celestina Warbeck song he would deny knowing under Veritaserum. She knew he had a scar through his eyebrow and did not know where it came from, and said so, because it was true. Wellbelove wrote it all down with a pleasant expression that did not reach anywhere near his eyes.
Then he capped his quill, and leaned forward, and lowered his voice as if they were friends.
"Miss Granger," he said. "May I speak plainly?"
"You may speak," said Hermione.
"No one in the Ministry thinks you should have to endure this. You wrote the Act; you shouldn't have to suffer under it. There is a provision, I believe, for a drafting exemption. Very obscure. I'd see it granted within the day. The marriage would simply be void." He smiled. "As if it never happened. You'd keep your post. You'd keep your little elves."
"And Mr Malfoy?"
"Well." He spread his soft pink hands. "If the marriage is void, then he will have failed to solemnise a match within the thirty days. It is day twenty-nine on Wednesday. I'm afraid Clause Nine would take its course. But I hardly think that need trouble you, of all people."
She looked at him for a while.
"There is no drafting exemption," she said.
His smile faltered very slightly.
"There's no drafting exemption because I drafted the Act, and I didn't put one in, because I thought it would be obscene. You'd have to argue one existed by implication in front of the full Wizengamot, and you would win, because you've got the votes, and you'd win on Wednesday afternoon. Day twenty-nine." She reached under the table and brought up the box tied in red tape and set it between them. "The Reparations Fund's Register of Interested Purchasers. Page one hundred and forty. Wellbelove and Daughters, Fine Antiquities, Diagon Alley. A standing bid on the entire contents of Malfoy Manor, lodged on the fourteenth of March. Three days after the Act's first reading."
Wellbelove had gone very still.
"Clause Six," said Hermione. "'Any officer of the Compliance Office who holds a pecuniary interest in the outcome of a match shall declare it, and shall recuse himself from that match's file.' You haven't declared it. I checked that yesterday as well." She stood up. "I'm sure you'll want to go and write your letter of recusal before Monday. I'd hate for anyone to have to refer it to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. I'd have to recuse myself as well, and then who would they get?"
He went. He did not say goodbye, and he did not quite manage to close the door quietly.
When she turned around, Draco was standing in the study doorway. He had heard every word. She could see it in his face.
"You requested the purchasers' register," he said, "on the day of the reading."
"You said day twenty-nine. I wanted to know why."
"You never said."
"Neither did you," said Hermione.
And then, because she had come this far and was wildly, stupidly tired of standing on the wrong side of desks, she went to the little window seat and picked up the sheet of parchment she had left there at five that morning, and held it out to him.
He took it. He read it. She watched him get to the end, because he was the kind of person who read things to the end, and she watched his face do absolutely nothing at all, which on Draco Malfoy was its own kind of shouting.
It was the letter. She had taken it down from the corkboard on Friday night. There was a neat round hole at the top where the pin had been for eight months.
"You wrote to me," she said.
He was quiet for a long time.
"Everyone was writing to you," he said at last. "After the first reading. The Prophet printed your name and your department and half of them, the ones from families like mine, were sending you things I wouldn't have handed to a Dementor. I knew because people were bragging about it at the Leaky. I wanted there to be one thing in your post that wasn't that."
"You didn't sign it."
"You'd have burned it."
"I'd have read it."
"You'd have read it," Draco said, "and then you'd have burned it."
She considered this honestly.
"Probably," she said.
"I come up to Level Two every Tuesday," he said. "To the artefact registry. Your door's always open. You've had that thing pinned above your desk since February. I've walked past it thirty-four times." He looked down at the parchment in his hands. "Do you have any idea what that does to a person, Granger? Thirty-four Tuesdays."
"Draco," she said.
It was the first time she had ever said his name. She heard him hear it.
He looked up. She crossed the room. She did not have a plan, which was unprecedented, and she did not have a list, which was worse, and she found that she did not mind either of those things nearly as much as she would have expected.
She kissed him.
It was clumsy for about a second, because he was a great deal taller than her and she had misjudged it, and then he made a low sound in his throat and dropped the letter and put one hand very carefully at the back of her neck, as if he had wanted to for so long he no longer trusted himself to do it quickly. He kissed her like he read things. All the way to the end.
When she finally pulled back, his forehead came down to rest against hers.
"Your terms," he said, a little unsteadily. "We've violated about three of them."
"Only one."
"Which one?"
She reached past him to the kitchen table, where the original agreement had been held to the fruit bowl with a magnet since the day he'd moved in. She uncapped her pen. She struck a single neat line through Three. We file for dissolution on the first day the Act allows.
Then she held the pen out to him.
"Your turn," said Hermione. "Unless you'd like to argue the drafting."
He looked at the parchment. He looked at her. And then Draco Malfoy, who had walked past her door thirty-four Tuesdays without knocking, took the pen out of her hand and wrote, in that long slanting script she would have known anywhere:
Six. We go to the Manor together. When you're ready. Not before.
He had written it as a term. She understood, reading it, that he was asking.